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tumblr The Last New Bedford Whaler

In August of 1924, hundreds of people gathered on the shores of New Bedford Harbor to see the last wooden whaling ship – the Wanderer - depart on what all knew to be its final voyage. It didn’t last long. Two days out to sea, the Wanderer was caught in a storm, and the last living vestige of American whaling was wrecked on the shores of Cuttyhunk Island.

In earlier and better times, New Bedford had been the undisputed whaling capital of the world. In its heyday in the 1840s the New Bedford fleet comprised over 60% of the world’s whaling vessels. The oil from leviathans hunted in all oceans of the world was used principally for lamps and candles. Globally renowned, New Bedford was one of the wealthier cities in the United States, known as ‘The City that Lit the World.’

But technology changed. In 1859, ‘Colonel’ Edwin Drake drilled his successful oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The discovery of cheap and widely available oil quickly led to the widespread use of kerosene in lamps, displacing the whale oil that had built New Bedford, and gradually bringing death to the whaling industry.

Now, nearly a century later, a new energy technology is being developed, and New Bedford seeks to claim its rightful place in this new energy era. In a strange evolution, those abundant winds upon which the whalers sailed have themselves now become the source of energy. And unlike the whales - hunted into nearly irreversible decline - the offshore wind resources are inexhaustible. So the Commonwealth of Massachusetts plans to harness the wind to meet today’s demand for electricity. With the help of the Port of New Bedford, the Commonwealth intends to build a Marine Commerce Terminal – costing as much as $100 million - to support a budding offshore wind industry that will be worth tens of billions of dollars for equipment manufacturers like General Electric, Siemens and American Superconductor, when mature.

Source: USA-EEA-BOEM

It will not be an easy task. Yesterday’s wooden ships and whaleboats will give way to towers soaring hundreds of feet into the sky, carbon fiber blades the length of football fields, and turbines the size of small trucks. The turbines and blades being considered for the job will probably be in the neighborhood of 6-10 MW each (this compares with the turbines in offshore Europe which typically range between 3-6 MW today, and averaged 4 MW last year). These new windmills will be leviathans themselves - current wind turbine blades are maxed out at 75 meters, but the technology will soon be pushing 100 meters. Put another way, when three blades are combined with a tower, they will eclipse the Washington Monument in height by 50%.

These turbines have to be large. Since offshore costs are 2 to 3 times those on land, one needs to put in the biggest turbines possible to take advantage of the constant winds offshore. Both blades and turbines will have to get bigger, better, and stronger in order to harvest the maximum amount of energy at the lowest cost. For example, increasing the rotor diameter from 150 m (today’s largest blades) to 200 m (currently in development by at least one competitor) the blades will increase in length by 33%, but the swept area, which captures the wind energy, will increase by 78% (πR2). The move towards bigger turbines is clearly accelerating. In 2012, 31 companies announced plans for 38 turbine models. Of these, 76% were for turbines larger than 5 MW, and a few were as large as 10 MW or greater.

With these types of improvements, the DOE’s National Offshore Wind Strategy looks to lower costs to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour by 2020, with a long-term goal of 7 cents by 2030. Significant technological developments will clearly need to happen for this to occur. Each windmill will cost in the tens of millions of dollars. However, the energy extracted from thin air by these wind farms could well be worth billions, and create thousands of new jobs in the Commonwealth.

It’s an alluring story. And so, on a cold day this past January, I visited the Port of New Bedford at the invitation of Richard K. Sullivan, Jr., Massachusetts Secretary of the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, to learn more about the Commonwealth’s ambitious plans for the Marine Commerce Terminal and the offshore wind industry as a whole. As we strolled the pier with his staff and clambered down onto the beach, a seal swam just offshore between us and the silk curtains deployed to prevent winter flounder from spawning near the construction site.

Walking the shoreline, Secretary Sullivan and his team explained the aims of the Commonwealth and the specific details of the project. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has articulated a goal of developing 2,000 megawatts of wind energy by 2020, with most of it offshore. The offshore wind resource is considerable: A recent US Department of Energy survey indicates there is enough offshore wind to equal four times current US electric consumption, with 25% of that off the Northeastern US. In an effort to streamline the permitting process, the Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has identified two formal wind energy areas off the Massachusetts coast covering nearly 1,000 square miles, with leases to be offered for sale by competitive auction in 2013. Secretary Sullivan explained that these two areas alone contain the potential for 9,000 MW of wind energy. To put that number in context, New England’s highest peak demand for electricity tops out at just over 28,000 MW.

Turning that wind into energy will require the development of multiple wind farms and hundreds – if not thousands – of turbines. And if the European experience is anything to go by, it requires a significant investment in onshore infrastructure and supporting industries to make it happen. Massachusetts intends to position itself at the crux of this development, and is therefore moving ahead with the infrastructure to make this happen. The Commonwealth has already developed the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s Wind Technology Testing Center in Charlestown, MA, just outside of Boston, where they are testing the enormous blade technologies necessary for offshore. The next step is to develop the requisite port facilities.

Source: Massachusetts Clean Energy Center

To that end, the Commonwealth recently issued a tender for construction of a 28-acre terminal, as well as dredging 47 acres of the harbor to the necessary depth. The actual terminal will be multi-duty, able to handle both the highly specialized needs of the offshore wind industry, as well as more generalized merchant shipping. Three bidders responded in time to meet the February 15th deadline, and selection of the contractor will occur shortly. The 1,000 foot extension to the existing South Terminal bulkhead will be the only one of its kind on the East Coast, reinforced with specialized steel, and built to withstand a pressure of 4,000 lbs per square foot. The affiliated crane will also be specialized as well to handle heavy and cumbersome loads.

The planners are not merely building for the needs of today’s industry, but rather for the requirements of the offshore wind industry in the decades to come. Everything is being supersized in anticipation of technology which may be on the drawing board but which does not exist today. They are also building with an eye to our possible climate future – in anticipation of projected sea level rise, the bulkheads will be 11’ (rather than 9’ of the surrounding piers) above sea level.

In order to allow passage for the required vessels (which are likely to cost up to $100 million each – base on the experience of offshore wind in Europe), the adjoining channel will be dredged to a depth of 30 feet. The avoidance of surprise is critical here: to ensure they know the level of work involved, and whether blasting would be required (probably not), over 60 borings have already been taken to ascertain both the strength of the bedrock upon which the bulkhead will be constructed as well as the material to be removed from the harbor. The bulkhead will be long enough to accommodate two ships plus two jack-up barges.

In the immediate future, it is probable that the ships arriving will be from European companies, carrying blades, towers and nacelles for the projects. The Europeans have been working offshore for years, and are currently the only ones with the expertise and know-how at this point. At the end of 2012, they have installed 1,662 turbines in 55 offshore wind farms, totaling 4,995 MW. Last year alone, 293 turbines were installed, totaling 1,166 MW, and representing investments estimated to be in the range of $4.5 to $6 bn. Many of these turbines have been installed in the unforgiving and harsh environment of the North Sea.

All of this equipment will be offloaded at the terminal. The value-added work taking place on shore will largely involve the electrical integration of the pieces. Once ready for assembly, the towers, blades, and nacelles housing the generators will be carried to sea on jack-up barges. These vessels are technological marvels themselves, involving a combination of buoyant hulls and movable legs that allow them to ascend to a desired height (as high as 150 feet above sea level). They are also expensive – the biggest of them go for nearly $100 million. Jack-up barges create the stable platforms necessary to drive the pilings for the towers 80 feet or more into the seabed, and secure the wind turbines.

Longer-term, if and when the industry gets a secure foothold, it is expected that the offshore wind companies will bring investments to the local area. Secretary Sullivan expressed optimism: “We think, from experience in Europe, that the tipping point is 2,000 MW in the pipeline. After that, the imported components will start to decrease and more manufacturing would take place here.” The result would be to establish the New Bedford and neighboring Fall River area as a core area for production of the various necessary inputs. Everybody from local shipbuilders to machine shops could benefit from the economic ripple effects.

Bob Mitchell, CEO of the Atlantic Wind Connection, a company looking to build out the transmission backbone linking the windfarms off the coast of New Jersey, feels that this on-shoring of the manufacturing capability is critical in the long run. “We need to get manufacturing on US soil. The range of cost saving, if that were to happen, is somewhere between 18 and 25%. That’s pretty dramatic.”